Killer Pancake gbcm-5 Read online

  John Richard was Heather’s obstetrician. He worried aloud about the fact that her red blood cell count didn’t seem to be improving even with standard doses of iron. I brought the O’Learys their first supper—a cold roast beef and spinach salad with Dijon vinaigrette that I secretly thought of as my Ironman Special. Heather had been so happy to see me, so grateful to have a new friend, she’d insisted I stay for tea. When our teacups were empty, she showed me the nursery her husband was painting, then she proudly pointed to the framed pictures of the Maclanahan and O’Leary clans. She was going to hang this pictorial album around the baby’s crib, so that the newest O’Leary would grow up with what Heather called “ancestor appreciation.” I’d acted more interested than I really was, until one photograph caught my attention.

  “Who’s that?” I pointed to an old, formally composed photograph of a couple. A very pale man—an Irishman?—stood behind a dark-haired, dark-complected woman.

  “Oh,” said Heather with a small laugh, “that’s Grandfather Maclanahan and Grandma Margaretta. He was an importer and had to travel to Italy every so often. He met Margaretta on a trip to Rimini, and fell in love with her because of her great Tortellini Delia Panna. Whoever heard of an Irishman smitten by pasta?”

  I stared at the picture with a prickly feeling. In those days, before I had a catering enterprise to keep me busy, I spent hours reading magazines. Friends said I was like a walking Reader’s Digest, especially when it came to food and medicine. When Heather was telling me about her grandmother Margaretta Sanese Maclanahan, I remembered an obscure article on genetic diseases similar to sickle cell anemia. I offhandedly asked Heather if she’d ever been tested for thalassemia, a blood disorder common among people from Mediterranean countries. She looked puzzled and said no. That night I mentioned to John Richard the possibility that Heather could be a carrier of this genetic blood disease. As a carrier rather than an actual thalassemic, Heather’s disorder might have manifested itself only in pregnancy. With a genetic irregularity of that kind, Heather and her husband should both be tested, I said, in case the infant would have full-blown thalassemia.

  Well. John Richard hooted. He scoffed. He laughed until the tears ran down his handsome cheeks. Where did you go to medical school? he wanted to know. Then he even called one of his buddies to cackle, Listen to the little wife’s diagnosis.

  The denouement wasn’t pretty. John Richard refused Heather’s request to be tested for thalassemia. She went to an ob-gyn in Denver who did the blood analysis—a very simple one, as it turned out—and confirmed the diagnosis. My diagnosis. Heather’s husband was tested—he did not carry the gene. The new doc pumped lots more iron into Heather than she’d been getting, she began to feel better, and she gave birth to a normal baby girl.

  I was rewarded with a black eye.

  I set the dough aside to rest. Here I was, years later, understandably ambivalent about sharing my ideas. Unfortunately, with my personality, once somebody presented me with a problem, I felt duty bound to jump in and help solve it. Arch sometimes resented this fiercely, of course, and I had painfully learned to let him take care of his own messes. Whether Julian felt the same way, I was not sure.

  I kneaded the cranberries and nuts into the silky dough, gathered the whole thing up, and nestled it into a buttered bowl. Time to have some espresso and put the past aside.

  As the coffee machine was heating up, Arch appeared in the kitchen with Scout draped over his shoulders. Once the dark liquid began its noisy spurt into shot glasses, Scout leapt to the kitchen floor.

  “Jeez, Mom! You scared him!”

  I steadied the shot glasses under the machine’s twin spurts. “It’s not as if he hasn’t heard this machine a thousand times before.”

  Arch watched the ten-second process in silence. After I stopped the flow of water, I poured the espresso into a small cup.

  “Gosh!” he exclaimed. “All that noise, and that’s all you get?”

  I sipped the strong coffee and let this pass. “Is Julian up yet?”

  Arch knelt on the kitchen floor and tried to attract the cat. Scout, however, wanted a fresh bag of cat food. This he indicated by standing resolutely next to his bowl, which held only undesirable, four-hour-old food. Receiving no response in the meal department, Scout sauntered across the floor and rolled onto his back. Arch enthusiastically rubbed his stomach.

  “Julian’s crying,” Arch announced without looking at me.

  “Did he talk to you? Is he still in bed?”

  “Still in bed. Under the covers. Didn’t want me to stay.” Scout curled his paws and stretched to his maximum length to prolong Arch’s ministrations. “He said for you not to bring him any food. He wants to be left alone today, and he’ll do all the cooking for the Chamber of Commerce brunch tomorrow morning.”

  Well, that was just great. But not unexpected. “How about you, kiddo? Want some breakfast?”

  He looked around the kitchen, but nothing caught his fancy. “No, thanks. Who are you cooking for?”

  “The food fair and the Braithwaites.”

  Arch pulled a long face. “Mrs. Barf-mate! That cow.”

  “Nice talk about a rich client, Arch.”

  “With Mrs. Barf-mate’s driving, you’re lucky I’m still alive.”

  Arch had been in the back seat when the accident occurred, and he was not about to let anyone forget it. He maintained to this day that Julian had put on his turn signal and slowed properly, even though Claire was giggling and cavorting around in the front seat and Julian couldn’t remember what he’d been doing. But it was Mrs. Braithwaite, Arch claimed, who was the bad driver. My son had insisted he had whiplash and post-traumatic stress syndrome, and we should sue Mrs. Braithwaite for bad driving. Unfortunately, the police had sided with Mrs. B.

  “Well,” said Arch in a resigned tone, “I guess Julian and I aren’t going to the Aspen Meadow Animal Hospital today. He promised, but he probably forgot. They let you hold the rats there,” he added brightly. “Big black and white rats.”

  “I’m sorry, Arch. I’d take you, but I have a ton of cooking to do, and I need to go see Marla.”

  Arch lifted the towel from the rising bread, peered in, and poked the dough with his finger. “How is she?”

  “Don’t know yet.”

  He sighed. “Maybe Todd’s dad could take us to the animal hospital. Their rats don’t bite there, they’ve trained them—”

  “Arch, please.”

  “I didn’t say I wanted to have a rat, I just want to hold one.”

  “Give Julian a little slack, hon. And me too, while you’re at it.”

  “I am, I am, but can’t we get another pet? If you don’t like rats, can we talk about ferrets? Tom likes them,” he said with a hopeful smile.

  I punched down the bread dough, divided it, and reshaped it in ring pans. “We have a cat. Please don’t bring Tom into this.”

  Arch frowned and reconsidered his strategy. “I guess I better go check on Julian. Should I take him some coffee? That doesn’t really count as food, does it?”

  “Sure, take him some. If he doesn’t want it, come on back.” I fixed a latte the way Julian liked it, with lots of cream and sugar. Arch disappeared just as Alicia knocked on my door. While she lugged in boxes of Portobello mushrooms and fresh herbs, I called the Coronary Care Unit of Southwest Hospital. Someone at the nurses’ station crisply informed me that Marla Korman had not yet been taken for her angiogram, and that the patient could not come to the phone. Marvelous. By the time Alicia had finished unloading the supplies, Arch had returned, dressed for the day in his tie-dyed shirt and torn jeans.

  “Julian’s drinking the coffee and says thanks. I’m going to Todd’s. There’s nothing to do around here.”

  “Does Julian want—”

  Arch pulled his mouth to one side and nudged his glasses up his nose. “He says he’ll come down when he wants to be with people.” Seeing my disappointed face, Arch patted my shoulder. “He’ll be okay. You kno
w Julian. He’s had a hard life, but he always manages to come through. All right, I’m leaving. It’s been real, Mom.” And with that, Arch strode out the front door clutching a bag of audiocassettes.

  Feeling helpless, I started on the fudge cookies. As I sifted dark brown cocoa powder over a white mountain of flour, I kept running the previous twenty-four hours through my mind. If only I had not accepted the assignment for the banquet. Would that have helped? Why had Claire even recommended me to her employers? I beat egg whites with canola oil and measured aromatic Mexican vanilla into the batter. Julian’s had a hard life. No kidding. His adoptive parents were far away, and now the young woman he’d fallen head-over-heels for was dead.

  The bread loaves came out of the oven golden-brown, studded with cranberries and nuts, and filling the kitchen with their rich scent. I placed the loaves on racks to cool and called the hospital again. Marla still hadn’t gone for her angiogram and could not come to the phone. I banged the receiver down and wondered how many people had heart attacks waiting in hospitals to be treated.

  I spooned even half-spheres of the cookie batter onto tin sheets and popped them into the oven. Ten minutes later, the fudge cookies emerged as perfect dark brown discs that smelled divine. I inhaled the life-giving smell of chocolate and quickly transferred the cookies to racks. While they were cooling, I got started washing the pile of dirtied bowls and pans. I was thinking black thoughts about Southwest Hospital, when Arch returned.

  I said, “Now what?” and immediately regretted it. Arch’s face was crestfallen.

  “I just … wasn’t in the mood for playing with Todd. I think I should go down to the hospital with you to see Marla.”

  I gathered him in for a hug, which, being thirteen, he didn’t return. “It’s okay, hon. I don’t know what’s going on with Marla, and I don’t know who they’ll let see her. If you stay here with Julian, that would be the best thing. Why don’t you try to take him some warm cookies and cold milk?”

  “He’s not five years old, Mom. And he said no food.”

  “Well then, take him another cup of coffee.” Not five years old. This was true. So at the last minute I poured an ounce of Tom’s VSOP cognac into Julian’s second latte. Julian was nineteen, in fact, but he wasn’t going to be driving anywhere today, and it was my—our—house, and I thought the kid needed a drink.

  Arch steadied the cup, took a whiff, said “Blech,” and left the kitchen. Five minutes later he returned, just as I was mixing skim milk into powdered sugar to make a vanilla glaze for the fudge cookies. “Okay. Julian took the coffee and he’s out of bed. He’s just kind of staring out the window and saying, ‘She was so beautiful, she was so perfect,’ and junky stuff like that.” He shrugged. “He didn’t want me to stay, though.”

  “Want to help me cook?”

  “Sure.” He washed his hands, watched what I was doing, then meticulously began to spread thin layers of white icing over the dark cookies. As I sat beside him icing my own pile of cookies, I knew better than to ask what he was thinking, and why he had decided to come home from Todd’s.

  “So,” Arch said at length, “d’you think Julian liked Claire so much because she was beautiful or because she was, you know, a good person?”

  I considered the icing on one cookie. “I have no idea. Probably both.”

  “I don’t think anyone will ever love me because of my looks.”

  I iced my last cookie and put down my spatula. “Arch, you are good-looking.”

  He rolled his eyes, then bent his wrist to ease his glasses back up his nose so he wouldn’t have to let go of his spatula. “You’re my mom. You’re supposed to say that.”

  Without looking at him, I started to sprinkle cocoa powder over the first row of iced cookies. The dark chocolate cookies with their pale icing and cocoa dusting looked beautiful. My son, the most precious person to me in the world, thought he was ugly. What’s wrong with this picture?

  “Arch, I don’t care what anyone says, you are attractive.”

  “Uh-huh. Remember the Valentine’s Day dance I went to at Elk Park Prep this year? My first and last dance at that school?”

  “But I told you, when you’re older you should try again—”

  He waved his spatula for me to be quiet. “There was an artist there. The school hired him for, like, entertainment. An artist who makes people look like cartoon characters, you know? What’s that called?”

  I sighed. “A caricaturist?”

  “Yeah. He drew caricatures of all the kids. Instead of dancing, we stood around watching him work. He gave each person’s … caricature … titles like Class Hero, Class Brains, Class Beauty. He would exaggerate each kid’s appearance, so that they would be flattered, you know?”

  I nodded, unsure of where this was going.

  “So then he did me. He exaggerated how thick my glasses are, how dark my freckles are, the way my chin goes in and my hair sticks out. He wrote in big letters at the bottom Class Nerd. Everybody laughed. So please don’t tell me I’m good-looking, when you know and I know and everybody else knows that I’m not.”

  “Oh, for heaven’s sake, sometimes the people at that school just make my flesh crawl—”

  “Don’t worry, Mom, the guy, the artist, apologized when the dance was over. Everybody was gone by then, but he did say he was sorry. The dance would have been awful without that happening anyway.” He waved his spatula dismissively. “Looks like all the cookies are done.”

  I took his spatula and mine and placed them in the sink. Embarrassed by his revelation, Arch stood up to leave.

  “Wait, hon, please. Sit down. I want to tell you something.”

  The air outside was heating up, and with all the cooking, the kitchen was even hotter. Arch threw himself into one of the kitchen chairs while I poured us both some lemonade.

  “You know I lived in New Jersey during most of my growing-up years.”

  “Mom, so what? What does that have to do with anything?”

  “Have you ever seen the famous Miss America pageant? It’s held in New Jersey. In Atlantic City. When I was growing up, we used to watch it on television. The neighborhood kids, I mean. It seemed like it was our pageant because it was held in our state.”

  Arch sipped lemonade. “I think that pageant is stupid. Todd and I always watch horror movies when it’s on.”

  “Listen. When I was fourteen, I was the oldest girl in our group of neighborhood kids. That year, I remember, we all watched the pageant and ate lemon Popsicles. At one point the announcer said this and that about the contestants, what they had to do to enter, blah, blah, and that young women had to be eighteen. So one of the kids in our little group piped up, ‘Gosh, Goldy, you’ve just got four years to go!’”

  Arch furrowed his brow. “So is that supposed to make me feel better about being called a nerd? That your friends wanted you to enter the Miss America contest?”

  I reached out for his hand, but he pulled it away. “You don’t understand. All the eyes of my friends turned to me. Expectantly. I wasn’t long-legged and skinny and I never would be. But that’s the problem. Whoever said girls should be expected to be in beauty contests? Why should anyone expect it? And that’s what I’m trying to say. They called you a nerd. Whether or not you believed it, you accepted it. What I realized at age fourteen is that everybody was counting on me to want to be in a beauty contest. But it was a contest that I had no intention of ever, ever entering.” I took a deep breath. “The problem is, if you’re a woman, and maybe if you’re a man too, when you get to be a teenager, it seems as if your whole life is going to be absorbed by a long series of stupid beauty contests, and I’m not just talking about Miss America. I’m talking about the way people judge you when you walk down the street. Or walk into a class. Or go to the gym. And the only solution is to say, ‘I’m not going to play this game! I quit the beauty contest! Now and forever!’”

  Arch waited to see if I had finished what I was going to say. He took a careful sip of his lemo
nade. Then he said, “May I go check on Julian now?”

  I exhaled, suddenly exhausted. “Sure. I’m going to see Marla.”

  “Okay. I’ll let you know if Julian comes out of the bedroom.” He paused, then said, “I don’t think he’s crying because Claire was so beautiful. I think he’s just feeling really empty.”

  “Yes, Arch. I’m sure you’re right.”

  Feeling disoriented and exhausted by my diatribe, I gathered up my purse and keys. That was when Arch did something that surprised me. He walked over and gave me a hug.

  At the hospital, a new receptionist referred me to the CCU nurses’ station.

  “We don’t know when your sister will be back, Miss Korman,” a nurse informed me. “They just wheeled her down to the cath lab.”

  “Will the angiogram take more than an hour?” I asked.

  “It shouldn’t, but you never know.”

  The thought of waiting in that hospital for an indeterminate amount of time seemed unbearable. I looked at the clock: three-thirty. Courage, I said to myself. She’s your best friend, and you’re going to be there for her.

  “Thank you. I’ll be back in an hour.”

  I still had to get my check from Prince & Grogan, so I drove over to the mall. A larger group of demonstrators was massed at the outside entrance to the department store than had been the previous day. Because of the accident, I doubted the police would let them back into the garage that day to wave their signs at the other entrance. Afraid that Shaman Krill might catch sight of me, I parked the van at the edge of a nearby bank parking lot. As soon as I got out of the car, I could hear the hoots and chants of the activists. Most of them were wearing white sweatsuits. As I came closer, I could see the chanting white-clad group wore blindfolds.Hip, hop! I can’t see!

  Hip, hop! Wha’ja do to me?